While we all know the last 18 months have presented innumerable challenges, they have also highlighted how some individuals can thrive in digital or remote environments, flipping the script on the competencies many sales leaders thought were tried-and-true in their world. As highlighted in our 2022 annual planning report, we see leading firms redirecting an average of 19% of their sales capacity from “Field Sellers” toward some combination of Inside Sales, eCommerce platforms, and Customer Success in 2022. As buyers’ willingness to engage virtually and sellers’ ability to close deals in the same environment continue to rise, you should have a pulse on the specific competencies that enable your sellers to thrive. To do this, start by setting the strategy from the top and building your new roles to support them appropriately.
So, how do I set up my 2022 role profiles for success?
- Define 2022’s Strategic Goals for Sales
- Prioritize the Competencies that Best Support Your Goals
- Track and Revise Talent Needs to Support Key Business Priorities
To understand more about your organization’s go-to-market maturity going into 2022, start with the SBI Growth Index.
Define 2022’s Strategic Goals for Sales
As a revenue leader, your success depends on how well you build a clear GTM strategy that aligns with the objectives of your overall organization. To ensure a great 2022, you must be prescriptive with your goals so that your sales leaders can lead in the same direction. What segments will you double down on in a post-COVID environment? How will you retain those customers most likely to churn? How will your customers engage with your brand going forward? These are all questions that you should address proactively by equipping your salesforce with the tools to address them in the field.
Prioritizing just a handful of strategic initiatives for the year can be a difficult process but is necessary to drive the level of change expected in today’s rapidly evolving landscape. If your functional strategy is well-aligned with the organization’s mission and growth goals, crafting the right competencies and KPIs for your team will become a much simpler process.
Prioritize the Competencies that Best Support Your Goals
While you may initially lean into role profiles that have contributed to your success in the past, it is an important (and often overlooked) step to assess their efficacy toward your goals today. Growth goals may remain steady, but adapting your workforce to support your changing strategic initiatives will give you a leg-up in an area your competitors may neglect. In short: as your strategy changes, so should your team.
As we shift to a more digitally focused buying landscape in many industries, you should craft your role profiles to excel in these environments, not just make do. Recent conversations with several tech CEOs highlighted the need for empathy and EQ in leading sales reps, as well as solid proficiency navigating data and analytics to help align activities to customers’ current buying stage and priorities. No matter what your 2022 goals are, it’s important that your role profiles help further their outcomes. Be as specific as possible about the competencies required for each role, not only to avoid role corruption internally, but to build accountability into your GTM engine for all roles.
Track and Revise Talent Needs to Support Key Business Priorities
While critical to align role competencies to strategic goals, the most important step in introducing seller profiles involves setting a method to measure the success of these roles once staffed. Leaders should define key performance indicators (KPIs) for each role and leverage them in the coaching process, providing clarity for how success is measured in the role and how it will contribute to your firm’s objectives. Just as each of your role competencies are thoughtfully selected to achieve your goals, established KPIs will help your team track success against those goals and adjust along the way.
While you may still be looking back to 2019 and 2020 plans, this year has introduced more permanent changes to the selling landscape that will help you inform your plan for 2022. Track performance of all roles consistently and leverage the data to inform your direction, even if that requires some course correction along the way.
By using your strategic goals for 2022 as a baseline, your team will be able to craft hyper-specific role profiles that will ensure your organization evolves with the changing buyer landscape.
To understand more about your organization’s go-to-market maturity going into 2022, start with the SBI Growth Index.
